Grains of Light
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Rated T for some dark/macabre themes and imagery. Like mass graves in the desert.
Small chips. One side rough, the other smooth, like a wave-polished shell. More fragments... rougher, porous, like sea sponge turned to stone. Scattered pieces, light and fragile in his hand, all turned white beneath the merciless sun.
Bones. Human bones, not the remains of a horse or a Thracian dragon. The smooth-edged splinters had come from an arm-bone or a shin, while the rougher chunks once belonged to a hip-bone, or perhaps the inside of a thigh-bone. This handful of bone was the first evidence of life he'd seen all that day.
Finn followed the trail of white chips across the barren ground of Yied, pacing out the area they defined. Someone, at some point in the past, had turned the earth over in this land that neither knew nor required any plough.
-x-
His old fears, like so much else, came to die in the desert.
He'd been running for half his life from the specter of the Yied massacre, running first with Prince Leif and Nanna in his arms and Raquesis at his side, then with the children only, and then following Prince Leif alone once Nanna was taken from them. And even when the circle closed, with Leif and Nanna joined in marriage beneath the crown of Thracia, there remained that great wasteland, that landscape of death that confronted Finn whenever he closed his eyes.
He'd imagined his lord and lady, their small daughter and the finest knights of Leonster, all strewn across the golden sand like broken, bloodied dolls. He'd imagined the aftermath, the vultures with their gore-stained beaks and the jackals with bones in their mouths, turning a scene of murder into one of defilement.
Finn knew now he'd been wrong about the desert. There were neither vultures nor jackals in this stretch of Yied. There were not even dung beetles, nor any flies. There was nothing at all.
When he imagined the death-scene of Lord Quan and Lady Ethlyn now, Finn saw in his mind empty eye-sockets, fingers that still reached out for fallen weapons, strands of hair that clung stubbornly to bleached skulls.
-x-
The grave was two days from the nearest village, and the authorities there did not want to take Finn seriously. The civilians came to his aid; they followed him with picks and shovels to that patch of turned-up sand. Finn sat with his new allies around the fire on the first night of the journey, and there he learned that they, too, had been longing for the desert to yield up something precious to them. A daughter. A son. A lover. A comrade.
The disappeared. Kidnapped and sold, turned to stone, offered up to the unspeakable god of the Lopto Mages.
"Not knowing is the worst," one village woman said to Finn, and the deep lines in her face grew deeper still as she took his hand in her own. "If you've found them, if you can give any of the children back to us, then at least we'll have that."
Finn murmured back agreement that it was worse to not know, to wonder, than to behold the truth. He did not confess to her, or to any of the villagers that he shared in their hurt, in their longing for something that was taken away. They could see it in him without asking, perhaps... or they knew Finn wouldn't be there if he, too, weren't seeking something in Yied's unforgiving sands.
Finn led them to the burial site, and the dig began at dawn, even before the Morning Star faded at the sun's advance. It didn't take long before one spade uncovered something stark and horrible in the pale soft light. Misshapen hands, still bound at the wrists, grasping out for something ever beyond reach.
Thirty-six pairs of hands and the ravaged bodies they belonged to. A daughter identified by her red shoes, a son recognized by the pattern of his shirt. They had been young, not quite children. Of an age, Finn thought, with Lord Leif and his comrades in the Liberation Army.
Prisoners of war, said the village mayor. Unfortunate, but in times of such great calamity...
Sacrifices, whispered the villagers. Finn wondered if it, in the end, made any difference.
-x-
The transparent skies of the desert glowed, awash with light long after the sun disappeared beyond the horizon. Finn stared up at a river of light across the heavens. Two stars, almost equally bright, were fixed upon opposite banks of that river. They looked lonely, Finn thought, and then he nearly laughed at himself. Had the sun over Yied dazzled him so badly that he now had the temerity to identify with the stars? That he might see himself in one, and Raquesis in the other? Raquesis, calling out across the heavenly river...
Finn blinked, and the stars were again only stars, shining down with cold light. He envisioned that light falling now upon Yied, falling in a dry rain, each flake of light reaching the earth to mingle with the innumerable grains of sand.
-x-
The next village Finn reached already knew the secrets of Yied.
Graves? You want the dead, they are over the crest of the hill.
Finn went where the villagers directed him, up the barren hill to something that at first seemed a thicket, a forest, to his sun-wearied eyes. A strange forest, bare of any leaf, swaying in the cold wind that came from the direction of Silesse. He heard the trees rattle with the sound of dry bones.
The trees, after all, were but grave-markers, slats of wood lashed together into lopsided crosses, each set above the exposed head of a dead soldier. Knights from the time of the Twelve Crusaders, sleeping in the desert in their shallow graves. The Silessian wind brought cold but no snow, and Finn could still see the colors of allegiance these knights had worn in life, see the bright gleam of metal in the broken weapons buried with them. Perhaps no drop of rain had blessed these corpses since the days that Dain and Nova walked the earth.
It occurred to Finn that there was no better place to hide a body than amid other bodies, and so he did look, searching out each leathery face, prodding the corpses with his traveler's staff. He found nothing familiar, and in truth, that failure relieved him. If some great power, perhaps the power of the Valkyrie staff, could raise these knights from their slumber, they might rise, ready to serve Emperor Seliph and the rest of the Crusaders' heirs. But Finn had no such power, and he left the warriors of an earlier age where he found them.
-x-
His old fears died in the wasteland of Yied. His memories did not; they rose in the night, more vivid than he'd allowed them to be in long years. Lord Quan's smile, and the reassuring touch of his hand. Lady Ethlyn's voice and her laughter. And Raquesis. He heard her whisper into his ear, saw her brown eyes, warm and bright and filled with unconquered spirit.
He knew she lived, or had lived at the time of Lord Leif's victory. Finn imagined that she would be returned to him in the state that she'd left him, that perhaps she slept as a living statue, and cold stone might again become the warm flesh that he remembered. He would imagine her soft golden hair beneath his fingers, her smooth cheek resting against his shoulder... and then Finn would catch himself, would touch his own dry hair and windburned face, and he would wonder again at himself. It had been... ten years, now? Twelve years. Did he truly wish, in some recess of his heart, that Raquesis would have lost all that time just so that he might see her again as she'd been the day of their parting?
The lady Altena, against all hope, had come home to them- not as a child, but as a woman who spoke and thought as a Thracian. That was Leonster's miracle, that a brave young warrior stood before them in place of small bones scattered in the desert.
How many miracles did Finn think he deserved?
-x-
In the mountains at the border of Yied and Isaach, Finn left a trail of dark footprints on the sparkling ground. A white crust upon the ground resembled snow, yet was salt. Everything in this land was a harsh joke upon its victims, from the false snow to the preserved armies of the dead.
Here, Finn turned around. Raquesis had never reached Isaach. She had not crossed these mountains. Neither, now, would he.
-x-
His path homeward was not straight, nor was it true. Finn wandered, adrift upon the sea of sand. He prayed at night that his steps the next morning might be guided; if guidance came to him, Finn didn't recognize it. At last, one evening when the lowering sun cast rays of scarlet lights through the purple dusk, Finn reached a place that felt familiar.
He stood, motionless, the night wind plucking at his garments and a shiver coursing down his spine. The aura...
An image of Princess Altena, atop a mountain in Manster with the Gae Bolg in her hand, flickered through his mind.
"Lord Quan passed this way," he said aloud, but even as the words crossed his lips, he realized his mistake. Lord Quan fell in this place.
As Finn sank to his knees, he realized he'd already dropped his traveling staff. It lay in a rude dark line against the pale earth. Finn glanced around, wondering what else he might see there in the sand. Not his master's lance, no, but one of his lady's healing staves? The weapons, the armor of the knights who fell around Lord Quan and Lady Ethlyn in the Thracian attack?
Finn remembered the army of the sleeping dead, and he shuddered. If this was the site, then where were they?
Two decades in the desert was both an eyeblink and an eternity. Finn saw nothing around him, no scattered bones or empty-eyed corpses, to testify to the shame of this killing field. Only ripples of sand and the presence of Lord Quan in the air, and one lone figure in the expanse of nothing.
He broke his staff into two unequal pieces, tied the pieces together with stiff fingers unwilling to work. The cross rattled in the wind as he set it upright in the sands.
"Lord Quan, Lady Ethlyn..."
His voice faded; what did he want to say to them after all this time? That his master's dream was realized? That Prince Leif was now King, that Altena was alive, with a husband and daughter to carry on the line of Nova? They knew all that, surely. They did not need Finn to come so great a distance to tell them.
"It is done," he whispered. He could feel salt stinging his eyes; in the stillness, he could hear the drops as they landed on the sand. It might have been the first water to touch the earth since blood spilled there twenty years before.
Finn spent the night by the foot of the makeshift cross in that spot that held the echo of Lord Quan's life-force. He lay there beneath the river of light streaming from horizon to horizon, the great wheel of the sky crossed by flashes of light like a rain of arrows. He thought he saw the light falling down to earth, one grain at a time, to mingle with the endless sands. Perhaps he dreamed it.
When he awoke, the sun shone pale-gold above the horizon, and the air no longer pulsed with the aura of a fallen hero. Finn set a course southward, in search of the curving road to Thracia.
For the first time, he felt certain of his destination.
The End
Author's Note: Originally inspired by Nostalgia for the Light, a film about the Atacama Desert. This incorporates Jugdral canon from various places- FE4, FE5, timelines, designers' notes, and such. Per FE5 Leif formally unifies Thracia in the year 780, so presumably Finn's lost years are 780-783, or perhaps 781-784.
If you want a super-happy ending, pretend he found stone!Raquesis on the way home and took her back to Thracia to be restored by the Kia Staff. If not, don't.